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Challenges for Gen Y managers to overcome

Barry Thomas of Cook Medical Asia Pacific gives us his insights into what challenge Gen Ys will face in management roles and how could they successfully overcome them.

Video transcript below:

Barry Thomas, Director, Cook Medical Asia Pacific
Barry Thomas: I think that’s going to be the biggest single challenge that they have, particularly as probably a lot of my generation learnt experientially rather than academically. These guys have learnt academically and less experientially. Now if they can capitalise on that, if they are able to you know work how to take the maximum benefit out of that, that will be very successful.

I think the biggest challenge that’s going to come for Gen Y managers is, we’ve got this aging population, we’ve got people staying in the work force much longer, we’ve got government saying when our retirement age is going up, so the opportunities for them are going to be less, because people are going to be staying longer and I think there is probably going to be quite a challenge to how do we shift from people thinking once they have got to a particular level that they are going to stay in that level till they retire or are they going to actually drop back and Gen Ys for example are going to come up and become their management and therein lies a significant challenge.

You know as an organisation, how are we going to develop Gen Ys. You know what do we see is, we’ve got them, where are we going to get them to where they are going to, you know and that’s about how are we going to mentor them. How are we going to encourage them in an organisation? Are we going to put them with people that can help them understand what an organisation needs, what losing is about, what making a mistake is about, what future is about and I think if we can do that appropriately as organisations, we will actually eliminate some of the pitfalls that could be coming at us.

You know in my experience in our organisation, there are some young people who would have hit the wall so to speak. I mean you have got to be there to hold them and catch them, right and encourage them to go forward, because very easily they lose the enthusiasm, they almost lose faith in themselves because for so long they kind of thought you know, I got straight As, you know I have got all 7s at University, how come I am not successful when I join an organisation. We have got to help them through that. It’s too easy to criticise. I think also you got to understand the future marketplace is them. So if they are telling you something right, you need to be thinking about that now, because going forward you could find yourself in a position where you have lost touch with who is your constituents, who is your market and they have been sitting there working alongside you the whole time. So I think that’s the value that they bring. There is a lot of, you know lot of challenges, but I think exciting, I think it’s where the future, future kind of lies.